“You’re a saxophone player, aren’t you, young man?” he said, suave as ever but a bit too cool. He must’ve seen me eyeing his fingers on the horn.
“Yes sir, I am. I’m from Philadelphia, and my name’s Robbie Coolidge.”
“Might you happen to be a tenor player by any chance?”
“Yes sir,” I said, nodding.
“Mind if I join you here? Seeing as you lost your hat and all,” he said, hand on the back of a chair. By “hat,” he meant Monique. Everyone knew that was the way Prez talked, funny names for everything. “Hat” was a new one, though. “My ‘people’ are in need of a little rest, is all,” he said, and wiggled his fingers. That was what he called his fingers, his “people”.
And of course I told him I didn’t mind, and offered to buy him a drink and he laughed and said now that all the drinks were free for him, he didn’t want no liquor no more. And then he just started talking to me. Asked me how old I was, asked me if I missed my mama’s cooking – I didn’t, my mama was a terrible cook, she used food as a kind of weapon when she was mad at me, but I didn’t tell him that – and then he told me about his own mama’s cooking.
I don’t remember exactly what he said, honestly; what I remember was his careful, quiet smile and his bright big eyes lit by some exploding volcano out the big dome window, and how goddamned happy he seemed to be remembering his mama in the kitchen, the smells and the favours coming back to him across all those years and all those miles from when he’d sat at the kitchen table waiting for dinner.
And don’t ask me how I knew, but right then, I realized that they’d done to him whatever they’d done to J.J. and to Bird, and that Lester Young, whoever he was, he was gone from the world, same as J.J. and maybe same as Bird, even. All that was left of the Prez was a shell, filled with something that was supposed to be him but wasn’t. That was what I was talking to, and it was all I could do not to cry in his face.
At the end of the set break, when he got up to play again, he told me, “Get off the ships, son. Get yourself on back to the Apple Core,” which was what he’d started calling Harlem after the war. “You’re way too young for this kind of life.”
A little while after he started to play again, Monique came in, and I just took her by the hand and we left.
“Listen, you jive-assed negroes, just listen to me for a minute! This shit they got us playing, man, it ain’t jazz! I don’t know what the fuck it is, but it ain’t human music. Jazz is for humans, my brothers!”
Some of them Muslim brothers were nodding their heads as I said this, but I knew one or two of them who wasn’t going to go along with this so easy.
“Boy, you all wet. You signed a god-damned contract.” It was Albert Grubbs, just like I expected. I forget the Muslim name he’d gone and taken for himself, but anyway, I knew him as Albert Grubbs, and sure enough, a few years later, everyone else did too, once he dropped all that religious bullshit. But right then, he was dead against us doing anything to upset relations with the Frogs, because he was still big on the whole space Muslim thing at the time. They figured if we was good enough Uncle Toms, the Frogs might give us some ships of our own, and let us fly around the solar system, so we could brag about beating white people to it. He looked about ready to start quoting the Koran or Mohammed or something like that, so I stood up. I wasn’t gonna rehearse no more till we talked it all out.
“Yeah, I signed a contract. You signed a contract, too. You know who else signed a him a contract? J.J. – and look at him now!”
Everyone turned and looked at him. And he was just polishing his bass, oblivious, and he turned and said, “What?”
“Everyone knows he ain’t the same. Don’t matter if you never met him before he got on this ship. He used to be goofy and funny and clean, man, took care of his ass. Now look at him,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Hey, J.J.,” I called out. “What’s your favourite movie? What’s your favourite kind of ice cream?”
“Shut up, man,” he said. His voice sounded deader than the worst junkie’s. “Leave me alone.”
Grubbs had a sour look on his face, and he was shaking his head, but some of the other space Muslims, they were nodding and mumbling to one another. Wasn’t none of them gonna colonize nothing if they all ended up like J.J.
“See? See that? I’m telling you,” I said. “The longer we stay on . . .”
“. . . the more of us end up like J.J.” It was Big C, nodding his fat bald head. “The kid’s got a point. I done something like six tours of the solar system, and one quick trip out to Alpha Centauri, too, and you know, there’s always one or two guys who get messed up like that, sometimes more. Lately, it’s been more like three or four guys a trip. I’ve been starting to wonder when my time’s gonna come.”
This started the guys murmuring, discussing, disagreeing.
Grubbs and this other older guy, another space Muslim I remember was calling himself Yakub El-Hassan, one of the trombone players, they stood up to start preaching. I knew I had to do something quick.
“Hey, Big C,” I said. “Tell me, you know anything about what happened to Charlie Parker?” Not even Grubbs had the guts to interrupt Big C.
And that was the story that turned the tide. Bird, man, Bird had been right there on that same ship as we were on, at least that was how Big C told it. He’d gone off dope but was still drinking like a fish, whiskey and wine, still eating fried chicken by the five-pound serving, still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, all of which, especially the liquor, was killing him.
“They took him away, and some of what they done to him, some of it gave him back what he lost back in Camarillo, that’s for sure. But what they did to him was even worse, killed off whatever was left from before Camarillo. Bird, man, he was ruined, all busted up inside. All he could to was play shit off records. Now, he played it crazy and slant. It was beautiful for what it was. But still, that was all he could do anymore. And to tell the truth, I heard they got copies of him. Extras, so they could have him around later. That whatever they took out of him, they kept it for the copies.”
The guys were all scared, then, all confused, and I knew finally I could maybe change their minds. Even Grubbs looked like he was starting to have his doubts, starting to feel like maybe we did have to make a stand.
“Man, you gotta think about it this way. They ain’t gonna copy nobody who don’t play what they like,” I said. “I mean, is this any better than slavery? Having your body copied and the most important part of you carried out into space? Your soul?” I said, hoping space Muslims believed in souls.
“Okay, so what can we do? Stop playing?” asked Yakub, still defiant, and though even Grubbs finally looked like he was ready to do something, he was nodding as if to say, Yeah, what can we do?
“Nuh-uh,” I said. “We stop playing, maybe they leave us on Jupiter or something. So we keep the contract. We play, but we play shit they don’t like. You never know, they might even drop us off at home early. And the only thing I ever promised when I signed up for this was that I’d play jazz, man.”
“I’m liking the sound of this,” Big C said, nodding his head. “Anything in mind?”
“Oh yeah, I got something in mind. Let’s go back to my place,” I said. “I got some LPs for us listen to, some new tunes to learn.”
Big C grinned his big old emcee grin and looked out into the crowd of Frogs. “Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever else you might happen to be. We’re glad to be back on the bandstand after our week off at Jupiter. We’ve got a whole new repertoire lined up for you, which we’ve worked hard to get ready, and we just know it’s gonna make a big splash. Welcome back, and remember: we’re the house band for the rest of this tour.”
Then he turned and faced the band, snapping his fingers one, two, one two three four, and then Jimmy Roscoe started the tune with a solo on the piano. “Straight, No Chaser,” it was, that night, my favourite Monk tune.
The band came in after a couple of bars, and not a go
ddamned one of us blurred. It wasn’t just that we were playing Monk, but we didn’t even blur when we played it. That made them crazy. The arrangement was lifted right off a Monk piano performance, the brass clanging out the tone clusters, and the saxes singing out his jagged solo in unison.
I never saw a roomful of Frogs clear out so fast, man. Not at first, of course; most of them waited until we segued into “Trinkle Tinkle” and they couldn’t stand it no longer. When aliens got sick off Monk, sometimes they even puked. It wasn’t pretty. Man, one of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life was old Heavy Gills slipping on some purple alien puke on the way out, falling right on his bassoon and snapping it in half. I still don’t know what it was about Monk that always turned them upside down like that. Even Monk didn’t know. Later, after I got back, I told him – Monk – about that night, and it cracked him up. He said some scientist had come and seen him, with some kind of theory, equations and charts and numbers, but he told me he figured the answer was a whole lot simpler than that. “It’s just a gift,” he said, and he winked.
Anyway, the trip home, man, it was a lot quicker than we expected. We just played a few Monk tunes at the start of every set, and the few Frogs who even bothered to show up left quick and then we had the ballroom to ourselves. For a while, we started playing around with what we could do in music without blurring. We could still make our fingers remember anything, could still remember any music we’d heard since going on board. I’m still that way, all these years later. I got so many goddamn tunes in my head, it’s like a music library, even now.
But of course we didn’t just work all the time. We jammed, and most of us (except the few who were still trying to be space Muslims) drank all night, and started bringing in the can-can girls – I’d talked Monique into stirring them up, and you know, they were French. They love their revolutions. So they was refusing to blur during their can-can dances, and their auditorium was just as empty as our ballroom, and they had all the time in the world to come drink and hang around with us. All those French girls around, tempting our Muslims from their righteous path and fooling around with the rest of us, it was like heaven for a while.
I think the only people who blurred anymore were the cowboys, because most of them were having the times of their lives chasing those blurred-up cows around all blurred up themselves like that. And some of the animals in the Russian circus, because they didn’t know any better. And maybe that Russian guy, too, though him and the Chinese chicks I never did see again.
So anyway, we were supposed to have gone out to Pluto, but a few days off Jupiter, the complaints got so bad that Big C was called up to go see the man – I mean the Frogs running the ship – but when he came back, he said the Frogs agreed we was playing jazz, just like in the contract, and the contract didn’t say nothing about no Monk, so there was nothing they could do. I half expected them to start lynching our asses, but they didn’t. The ship went ahead and turned around, headed for Earth just as fast as it fucking could. Me and Monique, we had a fine old time partying the nights away, night after night, but we knew this trip wasn’t gonna last forever.
“Marry me,” I said to her one night when we were lying in bed, both of us smoking. I wasn’t sure I meant it, wasn’t sure I wanted to marry anyone at all, but it sounded like the thing to say.
“Robbie,” she said, “I know you. You are musicien. You don’t need a wife. You are like a bluebird in the sky.”
I puffed on the cigarette. “I guess you’re right, baby.”
“Let’s enjoy the time we ’ave, and when we get ’ome, we don’t say goodbye, only ‘See you around the later.’”
I laughed a little. “Naw, you mean, ‘See you later.’ Or ‘See you around,’ baby. Not . . .”
“Whatever,” she said, and yanked the sheets off me.
You know, when we got to Earth, we landed in Africa.
Africa, man, the motherland, the place where all our music started. I was in Africa and the funny thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to get back to New York, to the clubs on West 52nd, to Minton’s.
But it took time. We came down an elevator near some city whose name I can’t remember, in what was then still Belgian Congo, which was lousy with wealthy Belgian refugees by then, and we rode down into town in jeeps. Monique sat with me, held my hand, but I couldn’t see her face through the sunglasses she wore. She had this big sun hat on, too, huge thing I’d never seen before, and she kept looking out across the hillsides.
Finally, when we got into the city, that was it. I lifted her suitcase out of the back of the jeep, and there we were, the guys from the band off to one side, waiting for me so we could all catch a flight back to New York, and all them can-can girls off to the other side waiting for her so they could all go back to Paris.
And there we were in the middle.
“What you gonna do?” I said.
“I am not coming to New York,” she said.
“I know. What are you gonna do?”
“I am going to go to Paris,” she said, but the French way, Paree. “I’m going to tell people what I ’ave seen, and ask the everyone to stop cooperating wit’ les grenouilles.” Which was exactly what she did, too, on and on until the Frogs finally just up and left. Not that they left because of her, I don’t think, but she never stopped fighting them.
“That sounds good,” I said, and I looked at her hands.
“’Ow about you?” she said, a little more softly.
“Me? I’m a musician, Monique. I’m gonna go home and play me some music.”
I kissed her, and I wanted that kiss to be magic, like in the stories your folks read you when you’re a little kid. When a kiss wakes up a princess or saves the world, that kind of shit. But all that happened was that she kissed me back for a little while, and then she was gone.
It was a hell of a thing, getting back to New York like that. Not just all the new buildings, or them new flying cars zipping around like they owned the place, crashing into one another. The goddamned Frogs, they were pissed at all of us from that tour. Those sons of bitches over at the Onyx, they had already tore up all the contracts, and I didn’t ever see more than a few thousand dollars from the whole thing, which was bullshit, really, since I’d signed up for a cool million, and been gone for almost half the time I’d signed up for.
But you know, in the end, I didn’t give a shit. Those pills I took, none of them had worn off yet. (Most of them still haven’t, even now, and it’s been decades.) My mama, she used to say, “Take whatever lemons you get in life, boy, and you go on and make yourself some lemonade.” My mama, she couldn’t cook to save her life, but she knew something, alright.
So I started making lemonade. I got myself one of those new typewriter-phones that everyone was buying, and sent a phone-letter to my buddies from the band, and on Monday nights, we started meeting down under the 145th Street Bridge.
Man, down under that bridge, with them new flying cars buzzing overhead, we invented a new kind of music. It was all about playing together, at the same time, like in old-fashioned Dixieland music, except that we were swinging it hard, real hard, and half of it was made of chunks of music from the libraries in our heads. Everyone who showed up there, we’d been up on the ships, so we all had libraries in our heads. Our fingers were programmed, you know, so we could play anything back that we wanted. You could start with a little Monk, then switch over to Bird, throw in a little Prez, and of course there was room for whatever else you wanted to play up in there, too, and man did we play.
All that memory and all those programmable chops that they gave us to make up for the fact that playing blurred was so hard, we used all of that. After a few months, we found none of us could blur anymore even if we wanted to, but we didn’t even care. We were doing something new, man, and all the music that’s come after, you can hear some of what we did right in there, still!
Time came years later when all of that would start to sound old-fashioned, when people would start ta
lking shit about us for that, criticizing us for ever having gone onto them Frogships and even blaming us for what happened in Russia and Europe, which is just crazy. Man, when we were fighting back, that was the first time ever where anything like that had been done, at least with the Frogs. It was all new. It’s easy to disrespect people making mistakes before you were born, way easier than worrying about not making your own mistakes. That’s just bullshit, trying to fill us up with regret for what’s all long gone now, like the Frogs.
Shit, maybe there are things I regret, like leaving Francine the way I did, or how I totally stopped visiting J.J. in the asylum after we got back. But most my regrets are for things that ain’t my fault. I regret seeing Prez the way he ended up, for instance, and I regret never seeing Big C again, and Monique for that matter. I used to think about all that a lot, after I first got back. Man, I remember lots of times when I used to stand there under the bridge while everyone was playing back all their favourite lines from old records we all knew, and I’d look up into the sky and find Jupiter. It’s easy, you know, just look up. It looks like a star, a bright old star up there. I’d stare on up at Jupiter, back then, and think of Prez, and blow a blues on my horn, the baddest old motherfucker of a blues that anybody anywhere ever heard in the world.
BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DAWN
Aliette de Bodard
New writer Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who was born in the United States but grew up in France, where she still lives. Only a couple of years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere.
Here she takes us sideways in time to an alternate world, where the details of history and the fortunes of empires may be very different from those we know, but heartache, loneliness, jealousy, and passion remain very much the same.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection Page 104
